


Sriracha Surprise

by crusherccme



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Gen, he's cooking in the kitchen of a frat house what did you expect, lots of pies, the culinary adventures of eric bittle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-04
Updated: 2018-03-04
Packaged: 2019-03-26 18:17:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,798
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13863264
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crusherccme/pseuds/crusherccme
Summary: There's hot sauce in the pie.





	Sriracha Surprise

**Author's Note:**

> This was not betaed so please let me know if you see any mistakes!

The first time Bitty steps foot into the Haus kitchen to inevitably bake a pie, there isn’t much in the way of ingredients. Some eggs in the fridge (half of them already hard boiled for some reason), some stale bread, and entire cabinets full of hot sauce.

Now Bitty is a proper southern gentleman, and as such he has no problem with a bit of spice. And as good as he is at scavenging for ingredients, he does need something as a base. So he puts some of the sriracha sauce into the pie. 

It’s not enough to be really be noticeable, and he does know how to mask certain flavors, so no one makes any comment about it. But good lord those hockey boys wolfed down that pie so fast that he wouldn’t be surprised if it never even hit their tongues. 

Maybe he could make use of the overstocked hot sauce cabinet, but he needed to do some experimenting first. He may like to stick to the tried and true Phelps family recipes, but he has never been afraid to try out something new in the kitchen.

\--

Once the team knows about his baking habit, and about how willing he is to share the fruits of his labor, the team eagerly braves the murder Stop & Shop to gather any ingredients he needs. So none of this experiment is for want of better ingredients, it’s just to see if he can.

Bitty starts off small, a few drops of hot sauce per pie. He’s had the base pie recipes enough times that he can detect the slight difference in flavor, a little bit of zing where there previously was none, but it doesn’t alter the flavor enough to make it really noticeable. 

His teammates certainly seem to still like it, Ransom, Holster, and Shitty shoveling pie into their faces as fast as possible, barely taking the time to give garbled compliments around mouthfuls of food. Jack is much more civilized about it, but even the hockey robot would give him a “Nice, Bittle” with every slice. Johnson sends him a wink, grabbing a slice on his way out the door.

Bitty wants to see how much hot sauce he can get away with before they notice.

\--

He increases the amount of hot sauce slowly to build up their tolerance for it. Of course, considering the amount already stocking the kitchen he’d guess that it’s already pretty high, but it’ll work out better to keep everyone on the same page. Since the heat of hot sauce is really just the tongue perceiving the spice as extreme heat, it is a tolerance that must be developed over time.

By the end of his first semester he’s putting nearly half a bottle in every pie. 

He has no idea how they haven’t noticed yet. Especially considering the rate at which he’s using up the bottles of sriracha, but someone keeps restocking the sriracha cabinet and he’s not going to question it. Bitty can’t even detect much of a difference between these pies and the ones where he started with just a couple drops. They’re definitely different from the sauce-less original recipe pies though. 

If there’s one thing he’s learned from chemistry labs this semester, it’s that you always need a control group. Only the same six hockey bros have been eating the pies. It’s time to expand his reach.

He waits until the next kegster and snags an unsuspecting Chad searching for more tub juice. The lax bros may be more strict about their diets than the hockey team, but it’s not difficult to convince him to try one piece.

“What the fuck is this?” says the Chad, spitting a half-chewed bite back onto the plate. “Are you trying to fucking poison me? What the fuck, dude.” Making a face of disgust, he drops the plate of pie on the table and storms out of the kitchen.

Bitty would let out an evil laugh, but he is a gentleman, thankyouverymuch, so he restrains himself to a quiet evil chuckle. The hot sauce is without a doubt one hundred percent noticeable. This is going to be fun.

\--

He may have gotten in a bit over his head. 

First Lardo came back and she wasn’t used to hot sauce pies so he had to be careful to put less in any that she might come into contact with to begin building up her pie spice tolerance. But he can’t back off altogether because then someone else might notice. So now he has to keep track of how much spice everyone can handle to ensure that everyone only eats the right pies for their tolerance. 

Then he goes home for the summer and every time he bakes a pie he has to stop himself from adding any hot sauce in. Lord knows Mama would never let him live that down. But honestly? He kinda misses the hot sauce. By now he associates the flavor with Haus and hockey and team.

Then the new semester begins and with it come the frogs. By now he has Lardo up to the same spice level of the guys but all these new recruits have nothing. He wants to get everyone to the same level so he won’t have to be careful with who gets which pie (and the boys are a bit suspicious of all the Frogs Only pies he makes special) and can begin increasing the overall level of spice again.

He wonders how long it will take for him to get to an entire bottle per pie. 

\--

It only really occurs to him how out of control this has become when Chowder confronts him about it one day. 

“Hey, Bitty. Can I ask you something about the pies?” Chowder says nervously. 

“Of course.”

“Well I was wondering if you put something in them? Well obviously you put a lot of things in them, but, like, I mean something that’s not really pie-like. Like Farmer tried some of my pie and she really didn’t like it, which I thought was weird because everyone loves your pies. But then we tried some of the pie you made for Shitty and Lardo and it really didn’t taste good. It seemed, like, spicy? I don’t know. But like, why would pie be spicy?”

Bitty froze, not at all prepared to be called out like this. Maybe it was a bit naive of him but he didn’t think at all about what would happen if someone found out. All he can think to do is come clean about it. “There’s sriracha sauce in the pies.”

“What? Sriracha? Like, why would you. . . .”

“Freshman year there was so much hot sauce here that I almost had to use it for something. So I tried putting it in the pies to see if anyone would notice. And y’all couldn’t even tell. So I kept adding more and y’all got used to it but then you frogs had a different spice tolerance so I had to make pies with less hot sauce for y’all.”

“Just how much hot sauce have we been eating?”

“You frogs only have about a quarter of a bottle per pie now, but the rest of the team is up to half a bottle.”

“Dude that’s wild. I couldn’t even tell!”

Bitty sags in relief that his favorite frog doesn’t seem too upset about his deception. For a second he was afraid that Chowder might hate him for it, but instead Chowder just laughs. 

“Just wait until the rest of the team finds out,” he says, grinning. “They’ll lose it! And to think that Ransom and Holster actually believe that they’re the true prank masters of the Haus when you’ve been getting us for, like, over a year.”

“Well since you figured out my secret, you’ve gotta figure out how we’re gonna tell everyone.”

“Oh I have some ideas. This is gonna be great!”

—

They wait for Pi Day, because what day more fitting than that for big revelations about pie, plus they already missed National Pie Day as it fell during their Winter Break. So on March 14 Bitty and Chowder gather the team into the Haus kitchen under the guise of having a pie party. 

To make the entire operation easier, the pies set on the table all contain frog levels of hot sauce. 

“Gather round y’all, and listen up,” Bitty says. “It’s Pi Day, so obviously I made pie. Now I want all y’all to try some of the pie here, but also save some room because I have a surprise pie for you after. So dig in, and enjoy!” 

Bitty serves himself a slice as the others begin to do so as well, then gets up and grabs a bottle of sriracha sauce from the cabinet. He very obviously sprinkles some on top of his slice and takes a big bite, taking great amusement at everyone’s horror. Grinning, he offers the bottle to Shitty. 

Shitty recoils, making a face of disgust. “Bro, I’m all for culinary adventures and food with sriracha, but really? I can’t believe you’d eat sriracha on pie, that’s just . . . no.”

Chowder snickers, trying to hide it behind his hand but failing as all eyes turn to him. “But Shitty,” he says, grinning, “you’ve been eating sriracha pie for over a year!”

“I put about half a bottle in every pie I make,” Bitty elaborates. 

The guys all try to make their displeasure known, and Bitty can only hear snippets from among the general cacophony. 

“. . . shocked and disgusted . . .”

“. . . dishonor on you, dishonor on your cow . . .”

Bitty stands up abruptly to catch their attention. “None of you had any complaints when you were eating the pie so I don’t want to hear any now! And I’ve made some sriracha-free pies for y’all to try to taste the difference.”

Chowder grabs the pies from where they’re hidden in the oven. The team digs in, still a bit disgruntled. 

Jack is the first to speak up. “Honestly? I think the pie is better with the hot sauce.” He grabs the bottle and starts shaking some onto his slice. 

There are a surprising number of nods of agreement. 

Shitty wraps an arm around Bitty’s shoulders and tugs him in for a side-hug. “I just can’t believe none of us noticed. Well played! And if you want to keep experimenting with hot sauce, well, I wouldn’t complain.”

Bitty looks at the smiling faces around him and feels relief. His experiment produced surprising results and his team didn’t care, though he could foresee lots of chirps about this in the future. He’s glad that his team is so supportive of his baking experiments. Maybe he could write his thesis about this. Maybe he could try soy sauce next.

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me on tumblr at crusherccme. I'm new to writing so I'd greatly appreciate some constructive criticism. Hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it! :)


End file.
